Secular Morality and the Strive for Faith in Others

When I was last active on this site roughly a year or so ago, I had recently denounced my Catholic faith in the spirit of teenage angst/bitter confusion. I was scared, pissed off, and disillusioned; moreover, I had basically become a cynical douche who thought he was somehow more inept to attaining knowledge of “the inner-workings of the universe” only because I had been forced to deal with several untimely deaths in my family/friend circle o’ peers.

Death sucks.

And not surprisingly, as the past year has progressed while I’ve tried keeping up with it, I’ve only had more strange life changes/altercations to deal with. More problems to overcome, more faces to encounter, more faith-shattering, ball-bustingesque scenarios. To deal with all of this “shit,” I dug a hole in myself, and only continued to bury my mind and emotions under books that I thought might hold answers. Novels, philosophy, theology, sociology: whatever.

Finally, after digging through works by guys like Camus, Sarte, Kafka, and others, and after having an awkward phase where Sylvia Plath was my favorite poet (yeah dude, it got that sad haha), one of my oldest friends turned me on to two works that shifted my mindset and got me moving on a more optimistic path in the ongoing quest for serenity in the midst of this world’s penetrating, brain-soaking madness.

Those works are: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and The Tao of Pooh by Benjamin Hoff.

Honestly, it’s works like these that give me hope. As I’ve continued on my journey, the sanctity of childhood, with its innocence, not-yet-perversed sense of empathy, and mindless honesty, has had me reconsidering my position within this world in terms of inter-personal relationships, environmental stewardship, and personal well-being.

How can we define what it means to be “OK” or, even more strenuously, “happy?”

In any event, the discussion I’m hoping to open up with this post is one concerning faith and morality in our modern, arguably skewed society.

What does it mean to have faith in others? Does that start with faith in the self?

Is empathy enough to guide morality? What forces drive apathy in our modern global sphere?

Yo Jack! Glad you hopped in, man. I definitely agree, and I think that's something people our age just have an incredibly/understandably hard time dealing with. I'd say a lot of the reason why goes back to our publicly exposed lives through social media and what not, and the amount of pressure that puts on adolescents to portray themselves as being as nearly-ideal as possible, ya know? Constant headache sort of thing. And rejection can easily happen online for the masses to see, which also just makes things like 10000x more petrifying haha. It's practically like we're setting ourselves up to defend ourselves from ourselves (and others).